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Obama’s open hostility toward Netanyahu and his disproportionate reaction to the unintentional slight delivered to Biden are important, and deadly serious, because there is no doubt they were authentic expressions of real emotion. We’ve seen Obama be a little churlish and somewhat peevish, but rarely more openly negative than that. Nothing in the course of his presidency has made him angry, so far as we know, in the way that Israel and Netanyahu have made him angry. Not Iran’s defiance and game-playing. Not the supposed chicanery of Wall Street and the monstrous insurance companies that have served as his populist targets. Not even Rush Limbaugh. –“Mr President: Your Animus is Showing,” John Podhoretz, Commentary

A Belarusian started out sane, just sitting there. Every 30 seconds a pitiless stream of water came out from a ceiling shower in the center of the sauna and splashed on the molten-hot rocks, creating a 100% humidity level in the room that would melt gold. About two minutes in our man started rocking a little. At three his eyes started blinking oddly. At four he began twitching. At five his eyes got huge. At six he started swallowing each breath like a gulp of scorching soup. Then he started glancing around wildly, as if to say to the others, Are you mad? Don’t you see what’s happening? They’ve locked us in a Crock-Pot! He started wiping his eyes and mouth. He moved his hands out toward his thighs to rub them, then realized that’s not allowed and did so anyway, crazily, as though he were covered in lice. The judges flagged him once, then twice. Then he lurched for the door, and he was out. Sanity and cool air whooshed back into his brain, and suddenly he was normal and smiling again. –“Sports From Hell,” Rick Reilly, ESPN

Not long after Jones’ conviction, a new mitochondrial-DNA test came into use that could have identified the hair with far more certainty than that microscope analysis — a technique that remains largely unchanged since it was first used in 1861. But Jones’ appeals to have the hair tested were denied, as was a last-minute petition to then Governor George W. Bush for a stay of execution. Bush had postponed other executions to wait for new DNA tests, but Jones had spectacularly bad timing. His petition came in the middle of the Florida recount fight after the 2000 presidential election. Bush’s legal team sent him a brief on the case, but it neglected to even mention the possibility of a new DNA test, and Jones became the 152nd — and final — inmate executed during Bush’s tenure. –“In Texas, Seeking the Truth About an Executed Man,” Nathan Thornburgh, Time

“He could be one of a million beach-bound, black-socked Florida retirees, not the man who, by some odd happenstance of life, possesses the brain of Albert Einstein — literally cut it out of the dead scientist's head.”